


Masquerade

by KathrynShadow



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Harley is a legitimate genius and I'll fight anyone who thinks otherwise, Identity Porn, Strangers to Friends, or at the very least Identity Shenanigans, the most unnecessary and self-indulgent fic I've ever written, the patented Wayne family lack of communication, yes all of these apply I promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-04 05:58:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14013690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: “Hey,” she says, grinning. “You’re not anasshole.”Dick has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling back, despite himself. “I try not to be,” he says. “Why does this feel like a trap?”She gasps, mock-offended, one hand rising to the collar of her shirt in feigned shock. “I would never trap a nice guy like you into anything,” she says. “Unless you wanted me to.”“Well,” he says dryly, “now that that incredibly suspicious statement is out of the way…”





	1. Chapter 1

Someone flops heavily into the chair across the table. Dick gets a vague impression of chipped green and red nail polish and then goes back to reading.

“Hey,” says the owner of the nail polish. “You’re not a dick.”

He blinks at his book, frowns, and looks up. “Really?” he says, voice flat.

He recognizes her, surprisingly—has one of those names that’s not so weird that you remember it automatically, but not ordinary enough that it’s easy to recall, so that’s out of the question; but he recognizes her voice. She’s in a psychology class that he’s taking mostly for fun and that she’s… very much not, from how often he hears said voice speaking up in said class.

She never really seemed like the type to poke fun at strangers to their faces, but that’s life for you.

“Huh?” she says. She blinks twice, then barks out a laugh that starts as a  _ pff _ and ends with something almost a shouting squeak. “Aww, sorry. I kinda forgot your name there. Can I start again?”

Dick… isn’t sure how to respond to that. “Sure?” he hazards.

The woman beams at him. “Thanks, sweetheart. Gimme one second.” And she darts out of the chair so fast that the legs squeak on the ground, makes a quick lap around the table—which would of course have been quicker if all of the tables didn’t stretch halfway across the cafeteria, but she shaves a few seconds off of it by just vaulting over it on the way back (her form is  _ really _ good, he notes with mild curiosity)—and plants herself back down in front of him.

“Hey,” she says, grinning. “You’re not an  _ asshole. _ ”

Dick has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling back, despite himself. “I try not to be,” he says. “Why does this feel like a trap?”

She gasps, mock-offended, one hand rising to the collar of her shirt in feigned shock. “I would  _ never _ trap a nice guy like you into anything,” she says. “Unless you wanted me to.”

“Well,” he says dryly, “now that  _ that _ incredibly suspicious statement is out of the way…”

She wrinkles her nose, but she’s smiling again. “Okay, okay, I’m gonna make this quick for ya,” she says. Folding her hands neatly on the table, she takes a breath. “I really really  _ really  _ don’t wanna go back home for any breaks ever again because if I do I might actually superglue my mom’s mouth shut but I don’t really have an excuse to stay here and I don’t have time for a real boyfriend and/or girlfriend and/or whateverfriend, but I’ll  _ totally _ buy you a pizza at least once if you pretend we’re dating so I have an excuse to… not. Please?”

Dick blinks, internally trying to figure out if that was actually one sentence or if it just sounded like one. “You can’t just… not have an excuse?”

She gives him a flat look. “Your parents are normal, aren’t they?”

“Not even slightly,” Dick says with a grin.

“But they shut up sometimes,” she presses.

“Usually when I don’t want him to,” Dick says.

She wrinkles her nose. “Look, I’m just sayin’, dinners with my mom are outlawed under the Geneva Convention. She thinks waterboarding is a nice drink to pair with the thumbscrew entree. I’ve been going here for four years and she still hasn’t stopped complaining about that either. I gotta have  _ something. _ ”

Four years? She looks maybe twenty, tops—but maybe she just looks younger than she is. He doesn’t ask. “How do you know I’m not already dating someone?”

She shrugs. “’Cause that wasn’t the first thing out of your mouth?”

Damn. “How do you know I don’t  _ want _ to be dating someone else?”

A roll of the eyes with enough exhausted disdain to potentially impress  _ Alfred. _ “This isn’t some kinda weird unbreakable contract, silly,” she says. “I’m just askin’. And if it doesn’t work out we can always fake break up or I can find another excuse. Or I’ll already have graduated, or whatever.”

Dick shakes his head, laughing. “This doesn’t feel kind of… needlessly complicated to you?”

She shrugs. “Hey, if it works, right? All I gotta do is pretend to be meeting your family in a few months.” A grin. “Best case scenario, I get to crash on your couch.”

This is—absolutely ridiculous. “I’ll think about it,” he says.

She grins and it kind of maybe lights up her entire body. “All I can really ask, right?” she says. With one hand, she takes his wrist, pulls it a little across the table and scoots his sleeve up his arm; with the other, she produces a ballpoint from… somewhere and starts writing on his forearm. Her first and last name at first (which Dick is quietly grateful for; saves him the trouble of trying to dig around to see who else is in that class and see if any names jump out at him), then a number (with an area code, inexplicably, even though it’s very local), and then an email address, and then a doodle of a little smiley face and a heart. And that’s about the point when Dick waits for the pen to leave his skin and then gently pulls his arm back before she tries to give him a full sleeve of contact information and notebook-margin scribbles.

“Nice to meet you, by the way,” she says, puffing an errant strand of bangs out of her eyes and putting the pen back in whatever mysterious pocket it came from.

“You too, Harley,” Dick says, and isn’t sure if he should be surprised he actually means it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hELLO AGAIN MY FRIENDS
> 
> sorry this one's a tad shorter than I'd like; I have a very firmly planned out middle and end but the beginning is a very long line of ??????? so please continue to bear with me. XD
> 
> eternal thanks to ProtoDan as per usual

Dick doesn’t forget about it, but he also doesn’t really think about it for very long after Harley wanders off. He keeps catching her handwriting on his wrist when he moves, jolting him with confusion for the half second before his brain processes what the scribbles are and why they’re there, but that’s about all of the dwelling he does on it.

Which means that when he goes back home and it’s time to put the mask on, it doesn’t really occur to him that it’s still there.

“Meet someone?” Batman asks, barely looking up from the computer.

“…huh?” Dick asks, frowning a little as he starts trying to sort out his bootlaces.

“I’m assuming you didn’t write half of a phonebook on yourself for fun. And that you didn’t completely change your handwriting since the last time I saw it.”

Dick feels a slight prickle of… something up his neck. Embarrassment, maybe. “Oh,” he says. “It’s, uh. It’s kind of a long story.”

Batman makes a disinterested noise. “As long as it’s not a long story that ends in someone getting hurt to get to you,” he says, and leaves it at that.

Dick rolls his eyes. “I’ll go change,” he says.

“Won’t help if your sleeve gets ripped.”

“I’ll probably be bleeding all over it, then,” he says crossly, but it’s a fair point. Bruce has a right to be paranoid, he guesses. (Honestly, he wouldn’t be half so irritating if he didn’t.)

Dick writes the whole thing down, even as redundant as she made it, and then spends an annoying amount of time in the bathroom trying to wash it off. Her taste in pens is apparently very good—and she dots her Is with little hearts, which is frankly adorable, and makes him almost want to leave at least that bit there.

Or she was flirting, but she could have taken a way more direct route if that was the case—and here’s the inconvenient part of being raised by Batman since before he hit puberty: the constant, irresistible urge to second-, third-, and fourth-guess everything that anybody does, whether it’s to try and figure out if they’re secretly a supervillain or a mob boss or just trying to ask him out in the most roundabout and inefficient way possible.

(It’s probably just her handwriting.)

There’s still a shadow of an H near the crook of his elbow, but this is probably about as good as he’s going to get without removing skin. Dick towels his arm off, pulls his sleeve back down and his gloves back on, and heads back to the main Cave.

“Did I miss anything?” he asks.

“The Joker’s been quiet,” Batman says. “I don’t like it.”

Well. That’s probably it for that conversation, then.

\--

Dick shoots her an email (with just as much semi-pointless contact information as she gave him) just for some reciprocity, but doesn’t actually see her again until their shared class hits, and it’s not a matter of him not looking. Either their schedules are just fundamentally out of sync with each other or she’s shoved so much in it that she only has time to grab dinner at 3 AM.

Or both. Both seems pretty likely.

Sure, he could find out for certain—hell, he could find out her entire background if he didn’t mind being a bit shady about it—in a few different ways, just to indulge his curiosity, but he prefers to just  _ ask _ when it comes to his friends.

Or potential friends. Whatever definition it is that Harley falls under right now.

Anyway. He spots her when he comes in, gives her a little wave and a smile, and is fully prepared to start weaving his way to his usual seat in the back when her answering wave stops being “oh hey I acknowledge you’re here too” and gets closer to “I’m practicing for a job directing airplanes on runways”.

A little bemused, he redirects, just barely managing not to jostle the person behind him. “Hey,” he says.

Harley beams up at him. “Hey,” she says, and leans over a little to nudge the chair to her right with her foot. “Promise I don’t bite, c’mon.”

Dick looks skeptically at the desk, then at the back of the room. “I’m not going to get glared at for stealing someone’s chair if I do, right?”

“You think I’d screw over a fake boyfriend like that? Nah. Other guy didn’t like me correcting his notes. You’re safe.”

He likes his seat; it’s mostly out of sight and almost perfectly equidistant to all of the exits. (As it turns out, some of Batman’s paranoid habits are actually useful even when you’re just at risk of being late for something, not getting suckerpunched by some guy with a weird suit and a weirder theme.) But… hey, he has been curious about her, and it’s a lot easier to learn about someone when you’re actually in the same room sometimes. He sits down, smiles at her sidelong. “I’ll try not to take it personally if you start correcting mine too,” he says.

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Harley says, propping her elbow up on the desk and leaning her chin on the heel of her hand. “I’ll only do it if you’re wrong.”

“I’ll try not to be wrong, then,” he says dryly.

“Could be a good pretend first meeting, though,” Harley says. “I mean,  _ I  _ think it’s cute.”

“Getting into character, huh?” he asks, leaning back in the chair and watching absently as a handful of stragglers filters in.

Harley smiles. “I was a theater kid.”

_ Of course she was, _ Dick thinks with something alarmingly like fondness.

* * *

Their conversation gets cut short by the actual class starting. She doesn’t end up correcting any of his notes, which he likes to think is because he doesn’t get anything wrong, but could just as easily be a matter of her not actually peeking in the first place or just her not being able to read his handwriting at that angle. (Or at all—but really, there’s no way it’s  _ that _ bad.)

Dick doesn’t try talking to her, but he does observe while he can. The heart thing is actually just how she writes her lowercase I. She sits in a half-slump that doesn’t look even remotely comfortable and she fidgets constantly—jiggling her knee under the table, wiggling one of her rainbow of pens back and forth in her fingers (dropping it twice), pulling at loose strands of her hair. She doodles on her paper more than she takes actual notes, and the notes that she does take appear to be half punctuation, but she’s clearly paying attention. Twenty minutes in, she yawns silently but explosively, muffling it as best as she can behind her hand and shaking herself sharply as her eyes water.

And, somehow, it isn’t until that point that Dick realizes she’s  _ exhausted. _ Maybe it’s just become so natural to him after watching Bruce, or maybe she’s just really good at acting energetic even when she isn’t, but either way he can’t not notice it now. The fidgeting and the sketching look less like normal habits and more like normal habits that have been co-opted into keeping her awake. There’s a worryingly large thermos on the ground next to her ankle; it’s not like he has much room to talk himself half the time, but god, she’s a little too small to make that much probably-coffee an  _ okay _ idea.

Maybe she isn’t actually much older than she looks, and maybe the whole  _ I’ve been here four years  _ thing is exactly as terrifyingly impressive as it sounded. It would definitely explain how she could run herself ragged enough to tip off Robin, even belatedly.

And maybe he isn’t actually paying as much attention as he really should be. Oops.

Harley jerks out of her chair at almost the exact second the professor stops talking, sorting out her spread of pens with startling speed before Dick even starts sitting up properly again.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m going to grab some food. If you want some?”

She blinks vacantly at him for a second before the words parse. “I usually want some,” she says. “Can’t take long, though.”

“I can be fast,” Dick says, and only begins to think he’s said something stupid when she grins at him.

“Don’t worry,” she says, her tone caught somewhere between flirtatious and malevolent. “I take that as a compliment.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> much thank to ProtoDan for betawork
> 
> much thank to all of you for putting up with my nonsense <3


End file.
